About “Drawing the Line”
“December 2012: Tens of thousands of people – women, men, families, young, old, rich, poor – come out onto the streets of towns and cities in India to protest the brutal gang rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi. For days and months, the protests refuse to die down. People demand change, action, commitment to the ideals of democrcy and egalitarianism. And they refuse to be silenced.”
—Drawing the Line, Indian Women Fight Back, Indian Edition, Zubaan Books, New Dehli, 2015
As a part of the national conversation happening in India around women’s rights, feminist publisher Zubaan Books (New Dehli) teamed up with The Goethe Institut (Germany) for a week-long workshop with a group of Indian women, aged 20 – 45.
The result was something remarkable.
Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! is a collection of 14 accounts of lived experience by women in India. Stories cover topics about gender, sexuality, harassment, coming of age, family, sisterhood, race, shadeism, class, and political struggle in a country that many in the West know little about.
Toronto-based comics publisher Ad Astra Comix, in partnership with Zubaan Books, are set to release the North American edition of this anthology. Our motives were simple. Here in North America, conversations around feminism and women’s rights are slowly moving from the margins to the mainstream, and within this is a push for those discussions to be inclusive, intersectional, and international in their outlook. We think ‘Drawing the Line’ is an example of how those discussions can happen on a mass scale.
Specifications
Drawing the Line, NA Edition is approximately 162 pages long. It includes 14 “chapters” of comics, each introduced by the artist. The book is introduced by Soni Singh of SketchyDesi and The Teal Mango. Additional commentary on the creation process is given by the book’s editors Priya Kuriyan, Larissa Bertonasco & Ludmilla Bartscht as an afterward. The book is black and white with a soft, colour cover, printed on eco-friendly paper in Canada.
Pre-Order Campaign (Sept 1 – 30)
Ad Astra Comix is crowd-sourcing the cost of printing Drawing the Line, NA Edition as a pre-order campaign on the popular platform Kickstarter, beginning Sept 1. We have designed our campaign to appeal to a variety of folks, from individuals to reading groups, classrooms, community organizations and bookstores. Exciting perks like special edition prints and stickers will be available to those who pre-order early or order higher volumes, and if community groups have proposals for custom orders (such as including a workshop series with their book purchase), we are all ears!
What is the DTL Press Kit?
We thought you’d never ask! Drawing the Line comes with a fascinating story. It has traveled thousands of miles, and now is reaching a whole new audience in North America. The Drawing the Line Press Kit is for anyone who is looking to help us document this journey.
Press releases and other updates about the project can be found on the PR BLOG – check this for news about the book during our pre-order campaign. You might find an opportunity to win a book or a special-edition art piece!
The book is also very good at beginning a lot of conversations–around race, shade, gender, employment, education, etc, and we wanted to help facilitate those conversations by providing some useful supplementary information, as you’ll find in our TOPICS OF INTEREST section.
Visit out ARTIST PROFILES section to know more about the contributors, and hear from them directly how this process has had an impact on their lives as amateur and professional artists living in India.
TESTIMONIALS and MEDIA COVERAGE will help you see who’s reading this book and what they have to say about it. We can’t wait to share this book with all of North America, and to continue the conversation: What does “Drawing the Line” look like for women in North America?
Drawing the Line - Press Kit 